PayPal's president, David Marcus, left the company for a job at Facebook last month, but its parent company eBay did not characterize this as one of its top concerns.
EBay highlighted two issues as its most "extraordinary events" from the first half of the year: a now-resolved conflict with activist investor
"Our focus is now on recovery," John Donahoe, president and CEO of eBay, said in a July 16 conference call to discuss the company's earnings for the second quarter.
Buyers who account for 85% of affected volume have reset their passwords, but they did not resume the level of eBay activity they had prior to the disclosure of the cyber-attack. EBay is now working on regaining these users' confidence and on convincing the remaining users to update their passwords.
But the effect of the breach has already been felt, and is a major factor in eBay's decision to lower the top end of its full-year revenue guidance by $200 million, to $18.3 billion. Changes Google made to its search engine, which affected eBay, were another factor in the lowered guidance.
EBay's revenue in the second quarter rose 13%, to $4.4 billion, from a year earlier. Its net income rose 6%, to $676 million.
Donahoe, who is acting as PayPal's interim president, says his search for a new PayPal boss has not yet actively begun.
"I'm using almost virtually the same approach I did last time in that in the first month, all the focus is on execution, not on the search," he says. Marcus joined PayPal in 2011 and was promoted to president in 2012 after his predecessor,
Donahoe did not say explicitly that he was looking to promote from within, but just as last time, he talked up the talents of PayPal's current leadership.
"It's a strong team that's got a great diversity of skills on it and it's a team that I have a lot of confidence in," he says. "With respect to the search over the next couple of months, I will work with them and others to identify what are the characteristics that we think should be embodied in the next leader of PayPal and I'll make a selection ... the one thing I'll say is that you need a portfolio of skills to run a highly innovative business at scale and the good news is regardless of who we pick as the president, that team has a strong portfolio of skills within it, so I think it gives us nice degrees of freedom."
EBay revealed last month that
PayPal's leadership team has changed a lot in recent years. Several of the people considered
But despite PayPal's leadership being in transition, eBay characterized its payments unit as being strengthened by growing use of mobile commerce.
Consumers are "buying more on the Web or on their mobile phones," even if it's at the websites of the same retailers they shop at in person, Donahoe says. That trend is "bullseye into PayPal's core products," he says.
